Rolland Baker - Keeping the Fire: Discovering the Heart of True Revival

This is a work about lineage.

I am not referring to a lineage of flesh and blood, but one of a spiritual nature. Families often pass on a spiritual lineage, because children are often (though assuredly not always) in an excellent position to stand upon the heights that their natural parents have captured for them. Such a lineage exists in and belongs to those with the will and the grace to take hold of it. It is for those who honor spiritual fathers to be spiritual sons.

Several years ago my father nearly died of cerebral malaria. When I visited Mozambique one recent summeras I have done every summer since I moved to AmericaI was told I should tell him good-bye.

Technically, I suppose this was a unique experience. But for me it was not an unusual one. My mother and father have been imprisoned, mugged, deported, robbed and assaulted by more diseases of the developing world than we have means to diagnose. They receive more death threats than we bother to count. They have been beaten with varying degrees of severity, and stood many times at knifepoint or gun muzzle. They have often faced armed extortion, angry mobs, blackmail, carjackings and street muggings. I have heard dire warnings from many doctors about their imminent demise. My mother, in particular, has recovered from more than one diagnosis of some incurable disease (and for all the miracles we have seen, I still hope each one is the last).

They have faced riots, some personally directed at them; the latter having arisen because desperate people wanted more from them than they had to give. They have faced accusations from spying for the CIA to drug trafficking to selling the organs of orphans on the black market (providing childrens brains to the witch doctors for potions, as one rumor had itfor which a furious crowd once chased one of our staff members through a cluttered marketplace in Maputo). My mother has never been shipwrecked, quite, but last year she came very close during bad weather off the coast of northern Mozambique. Her boat was swamped, and she was given a ride home by a canoe full of naked fishermen. One of the men swam to shore and back to fetch them all clothes, so that she would not be uncomfortable while they rowed her back to civilization.

My family has taught, by the entirety of their lives, these words: He who seeks his life shall lose it, but he who loses his life shall find it (see Matthew 16:25). All of my instruction as a youth has taught that it is worth any price to serve the Lord. Constantly to offer your life for His sake, and for the sake of those He loveseven for the sake of those who are yet His enemiesis the only kind of life that is worth living. This is the truth. You are born for union with God. In a way that is uniquely proper to you, you are to act as God toward the world, and as the very Almighty toward all who are in it. The danger of doing this is exquisitely real. It is also inseparable from its glory. You are to be glorious. To live out this union risks pain for you, your loved ones and all who love you. For Jesus it led to torture and deathand ultimately to the similar deaths of most of His disciples. If you are like Jesus, your pains will come through no error of your own. If, however, your mind is not yet entirely conformed to the likeness of His (and who claims this?), some of your pains will also come from your own errors.

It is nonetheless worth risking the possibility of errors, and the greater errors that descend from greater dreams. It is worth daring to act like God. It is worth stepping out of a boat in the belief that you can walk on water. It is worth going to the ends of the earth. If need be, it is also worth staying in a place that may kill you. It istake my word on itabsolutely worth putting even your children in a certain kind of danger. In this world you cannot keep them from danger. But your absolute obedience to God will be to them the greatest inheritance imaginable. It is a mighty lineage.

Do this, and they will indeed have to choose for themselves how to respond to the trials you will have subjected them to. Whether in response to your successes or your failures, they may make foolish choices. They may hurt. They may fail. They may learn things that you did not. They may fall short. They may surpass you. They may do both, in different times and ways. But in this way, and in this way only, you will have given them the best that any parent can give. If they wish to take up these trials, then at their hands will lay immortal riches, refined by fire. These are worth the cost, for our Lord did not lie:

No one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fieldsalong with persecutionsand in the age to come eternal life.

Mark 10:2930 NIV

If you walk hand in hand with your loved ones through the valley of the shadow of death, fear no evil. I say He makes no promise that you will never have to lay your firstborn upon an altar. But God loves your children more than you. And lineagelineage! Leave this lineage to them in its purity, and you will yet see a great mystery, as great as the sacrifice of Gods own child.

By that mystery, in all the heavens it will surely be said of your childrenas many as desire that which you have left for themHe will cover them with His feathers, and under His wings they will find refuge; His faithfulness will be their shield and rampart. They will not fear the terror of night, nor the arrow that flies by day, nor the pestilence that stalks in the darkness, nor the plague that destroys at midday. A thousand may fall at their side, ten thousand at their right hand, but it will not come near them. Because they love Me, the Lord will say, I will rescue them. I will protect them, for they acknowledge My name. They will call upon Me, and I will answer them. I will be with them in trouble. I will deliver them. I will honor them. With long life I will satisfy them, and show them My salvation (see Psalm 91:47, 1416).